"It's only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism"
About this Quote
Del Toro’s line lands like a sly rebuke to a culture that insists it’s progressive while quietly worshipping parasites. Coming from a director who’s built an entire career on making monsters intimate and institutions monstrous, “glorify vampirism” isn’t really about capes and fangs. It’s about appetite dressed up as romance, predation sold as style, and the way modern storytelling keeps mistaking extraction for intensity.
The intent is pointed: to remind us that the vampire wasn’t always a heartthrob. In older folklore, the undead are warnings - about disease, about outsiders, about death’s refusal to stay buried. Modernity flips the moral signage. We don’t just fear the vampire; we aestheticize it, eroticize it, give it a tragic backstory and a better tailor. Del Toro is calling out that inversion: the cultural move where danger becomes a brand, where the “bad” is redeemed not through change but through charisma.
The subtext reaches beyond horror. “Vampirism” reads as a metaphor for systems that feed on people while insisting they’re desirable: celebrity culture, luxury capitalism, even certain forms of love-as-consumption. The “only in modern times” jab implies this isn’t timeless myth; it’s a contemporary habit, born of marketing, fandom, and a media ecosystem that rewards glamour over ethics.
It works because it’s compact, accusatory, and a little funny: a monster movie guy pointing at the audience and asking why we’re cheering for the bite.
The intent is pointed: to remind us that the vampire wasn’t always a heartthrob. In older folklore, the undead are warnings - about disease, about outsiders, about death’s refusal to stay buried. Modernity flips the moral signage. We don’t just fear the vampire; we aestheticize it, eroticize it, give it a tragic backstory and a better tailor. Del Toro is calling out that inversion: the cultural move where danger becomes a brand, where the “bad” is redeemed not through change but through charisma.
The subtext reaches beyond horror. “Vampirism” reads as a metaphor for systems that feed on people while insisting they’re desirable: celebrity culture, luxury capitalism, even certain forms of love-as-consumption. The “only in modern times” jab implies this isn’t timeless myth; it’s a contemporary habit, born of marketing, fandom, and a media ecosystem that rewards glamour over ethics.
It works because it’s compact, accusatory, and a little funny: a monster movie guy pointing at the audience and asking why we’re cheering for the bite.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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